AZDecrypt notes, tips and tricks

Solvers

AZDecrypt's main window has a list of solvers. Each one is a type of hillclimber that specializes in different types of ciphers:

• Substitution
  • Simple substitution ciphers (including homophonic substitution)
• Substitution + columnar rearrangement
  • A combination of simple substitution and moving columns around.
• Substitution + columnar transposition
  • A combination of simple substitution and columnar transposition.
• Substitution + crib grid
  • This solver displays a grid that is the same shape as the input cipher. You can enter your guesses for portions of the plaintext. Then, the solver will search for the rest of the plaintext but maintain the plaintext entries you've made.
• Substitution + crib list
• Substitution + monoalphabetic groups
• Substitution + nulls and skips
  • Tries to figure out if certain symbols in a substitution cipher don't actually contribute towards the plaintext.
  • A "null" is a position in the cipher text that does not translate to plaintext (and is ignored during decryption). The solver will consider different positions to be nulls, and exclude them prior to the next steps of decryption.
  • A "skip" is a missing symbol that is inserted at some position in the cipher. The solver will put them in different positions of the ciphertext before proceeding to the next steps of decryption.
  • More info
• Substitution + polyphones
• Substitution + row bound
• Substitution + row bound fragments
• Substitution + sequential homophones
• Substitution + simple transposition
• Substitution + sparse polyalphabetism
• Substitution + units
  • Jarl's note on using this solver on nomenclator type ciphers:
    • After launching the solver a menu will pop up. You can set the Unit as Symbol or Horizontal sequence, the Mode to Replace with new symbols. If selected Horizontal sequence set the Horizontal sequence to 1. The Key length start determines the amount of Symbols or Horizontal sequences to be replaced. And set Replace, # of symbols per instance to 2 if you want to replace symbols with bigrams for example.
• Substitution + vigenere
• Substitution + vigenere word list
• Bigram substitution
• Higher-order homophonic
• Merge sequential homophones

Settings

• Multiplicity weight
  • This value will "punish" solutions that are produced by increasing the multiplicity (ratio of unique symbols to cipher length) of the cipher text. Defaults to 0 which means this punishment will not occur. A value of 1 is a good starting point for including the punishment.
  • Jarl says: It follows this calculation: score/=1+((unique_symbols/cipher_length)*multiplicity_weight). The higher the multiplicity, the more the score will be reduced. It may prevent some of the solvers from inflating the score by changes that increase multiplicity. It will still do that but now there is a trade off. Secondly it can also be used as a filter, in case of using the Substitution + units solver for removing the spaces as nulls, the key size (amount of null symbols) will increase with every hill-climber iteration and eventually the multiplicity will become very high and the solver may find non-solutions that exceed the score of the underlying plain text, in that case the multiplicity weight will punish these and the best solution (according to the multiplicity weight trade off) will still be on top, sort of.

Pangrams

AZDecrypt was not able to solve this cipher with default settings:

ABC DEFGH IJKLM NKO PEQRS KTCJ U VUWX YKZ RUGH QX IKO LFAB NFTC YKWCM VFDEKJ PEZS

The plaintext consists of two pangrams:

THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER A LAZY DOG PACK MY BOX WITH FIVE DOZEN LIQUOR JUGS

Jarl's fix, under "Options -> Solvers":

• Boost Entropy weight to 10
• Click the "Normalize n-gram factor" button

Now it can solve the cipher.

Batch mode

In batch mode (processing multiple ciphers), under default settings, AZDecrypt will not write output files if newly cracked ciphers' scores are not higher than previously cracked ciphers' scores. To change this, set "Output improvements only" to "No" in "Options -> Solvers"

Solving "Ambiguous Caesar shift" ciphers (aka Hafer ciphers or Hafer homophonic ciphers)

Instructions and details on configuring AZDecrypt to solve these kinds of ciphers can be found here.

The description of the encipherment system is here.

Jarlve posted a new version of AZDecrypt that can solve Hafer ciphers here.

Polyphone solver improvements

Jarl has added improvements to the polyphone solver. Details here.

Compute score for a given plaintext

Sometimes, you might want to know what score AZDecrypt would give to a piece of plaintext. There is not yet an exact feature for this, but you can achieve it this way: Use the "Substitution + crib grid" solver, click on Show cipher and then type in the letters of the plain text. Though you will have to leave one letter uncribbed for it to work.

Homophonic substitution with spaces

Sometimes a homophonic substitution cipher will encode spaces with one or more symbols. AZdecrypt does not have a direct feature for this. However, it can be made to deal with spaces by using the Substitution + units solver with the standard settings, Unit: symbol, Mode: Remove and perhaps Multiplicity weight: 1. (Thread)